"Search your Feelings Luke" ... "You know it to be true ..."

Feelings!!? What have they got to do with a search engine?

Well trails are really search memories and human memories are always made while you're feeling something. Your first kiss, that time you almost got run over by a car are no doubt strong memories!

"Go on search your feelings? You know it to be true."

Likewise with search trails how we feel may make a difference. When we start searching we are initially positive until we don't find what we're looking and then increasing pessimism sets in, until, hopefully, we find what we're looking for and our feelings swing upwards again - so feelings do play a part in searching.

We are currently investigating merging and pruning trails to arrive at optimal trails - and my feeling is that modelling feelings may help ... stay tuned for more details.

Version 2 - New Front Page

Check out Trexy's new front page that helps accentuate the "Cycle of Search".

Trexy Blog Turns Two Today!

The blog has been a great way for us to share Trexy’s trails and tribulations with you all.

It only seems like yesterday we had our first birthday.

The past year has flown by rapidly. We have had a fantastic time attending conferences, organising regular Flag and Bell events, winning various industry awards and of course working on Trexy improvements and getting through the tough times.

Some highlights from the last year include:

Trexy successes:

Trexy Wins British Computer Society

Trexy wins best speciality search

2006 Search Roadshow comes to an end

There have been changes to the Trexy team during the year:

Then there were six

Welcome Earle

Where’s Rena

The tough times:

Trials not Trails

Romanian Cracker in Retreat

We are looking forward to reporting on another year of progress at Trexy.

Look out for the new version of Trexy coming soon.

Blazing a trail from Lib 1.0 to Lib 2.0

Nigel and I are back in the office today after attending the EUSIDIC Conference in Denmark. We had a really great time.

Nigel’s presentation was about “Blazing a trail from Lib 1.0 to Lib 2.0”. To illustrate the ideas behind Trexy, he used an example of changing the working environment of traditional libraries.


Instead of libraries being 'quiet' places, he suggested making them 'knowledge construction zones'. A place where people can be loud, discuss and collaborate ideas and share knowledge.

Highlighters and post-it notes should be issued at the door and people should be encouraged to annotate books by writing and highlighting useful ideas. This should be a place where silence is an exception, not a rule.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could harness the intellectual efforts of millions of students and librarians across the globe? This is where the idea behind Trexy comes in.

Trexy in Denmark

Nigel and I are at the European Association of Information Services (EUSIDIC) Conference in Denmark today.

The theme of the conference is: "What will be the impact of Web2.0 and Library2.0 applications on user services in library and information services management."

Nigel will be speaking at 4 p.m. about Trexy and social search. Hope it goes well.

F.A.B. numbers keep growing

The Trexy Pub Trail took place last night at the lovely Bank of England Pub.

At the first pub we played a new networking trail game. It involved matching a list of six questions to a person who could answer, "yes". Some of the questions were:

• Find someone who programs in Perl
• Find someone who loves KFC
• Find someone who has never been rock climbing
• Find someone who has a hotmail account
• Find someone who is an eBay merchant
• Find someone who catches the central line to work

Some questions were trickier than others. Would you believe that nobody was wearing a white shirt!??

We then continued on to the George Pub, opposite the Royal Courts of Justice.

Looking forward to doing it all again next month.

April's Flag & Bell will be sponsored by Bond Marvel Consulting.

If you, or your company, is interested in sponsoring future Flag & Bell events it would be great if you could let me know.

Mining Trail Logs for Semantically Related Queries

This is the title of the latest academic paper on Trexy. The findings were not as clear cut as the first paper but we are gaining deeper understanding of the trail space - there are many more papers to come.

We had a great discussion with the co-authors in the pub before the Flag & Bell and I'm looking forward to the next installment of research.

Stay tuned for the publication date of this paper later in the year.

Certainly Firm

The Rotherhithe office has been overtaken by plush Trexy goats - 2000 of them!

13 boxes just arrived from China today.

We are happy with the quality of the batch.

They are certainly firmer than the last batch we received.

We were glad Sven was in the office to help move the boxes in.